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December 2007

Monday, 31 December 2007

It's New Year's Day, a time for Bowl games, maybe a little more overeating, maybe some time for recovering from last night, and for many of us, generally a coda to the holiday season. Every year about this time we at T.O.P. cast our idiosyncratic net wide across the previous 364 days and see what still strikes us as remarkable or unusual. No one cares about our awards, which helps keep them both light and fun. Without further ado, here are our year-end plaudits as we usher out the photographic year that was.

T.O.P. Photographer of the Year 2007:Chris Jordan, for "Running the Numbers: American Self-Portrait." It's very seldom that photographic means, artistic ends, and social/economic/political meaning come together in work that looks and feels like nothing you've seen before.

Chris Jordan: Prison Uniforms, 2007. 10x23 feet in six vertical panels (Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.)

Detail near actual size

Installed at the Von Lintel Gallery, New York city, June 2007

Chris Jordan's tableau have the beauty of abstractions and the significance of specificity. (Prison Uniforms
is just one example.) They address one of the persistent failings of
the human mind: our inability to conceive adequately of extremes of
scope and scale. Jordan found a way to address this "scope and scale blindness" with our most acute and natural sense, sight, and in so doing has opened our not just our eyes but our minds. Brilliant, and bravo.

Reviewer of the Year: Rob Galbraith, for uncovering the autofocusing malfunction in the Canon EOS 1D Mark III. As reviewers and former magazine editors, we understand only too well what kind of work it takes to discover a flaw like this, which only pales in comparison to the cojones required to go public with it and stick by your guns while the big corporate battle wagons train their sixteen-inchers on your little butt. Rob's tests were thorough and rigorous and his presentation of his findings calm yet unflinching. After some initial, um, confusion by giant Canon, the company buckled down and found the specific technical problem causing the specific malfunction—and fixed it. Meaning, everybody who bought one of these cameras or who will buy one owes Rob an enormous debt. We kowtow in RG's general direction, chanting il critico miglior.

Photo Product of the Year:Harman Gloss FB AL paper. A fine
baryta paper equally suited for black-and-white or color that mimics
the look of air-dried glossy fiber-base paper. "Images look sharper on
this paper than on any other paper we have seen.
This means you need quite a bit less of sharpening for output." —Outback Photo. See the reviews on Outback Photo and The Luminous Landscape. This paper is already spawning imitators, such as Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta, Epson Exhibition Fiber, and Ilford Gold Fiber Silk. At some point during the coming year we hope to offer you a low-priced example print made on Harman Gloss FB AL, as well as examples of a few other outstanding materials and techniques. Workin' on it.

(Note: the link is to a 5-sheet sample pack that costs less than $5. Add it to your next order and give it a try.)

Comeback of the Year: Olympus, for finally following up on the ghost of the E-1 with the new E-3. Better late than never, as they say—and that's true, although it's also worth remembering that it's better to be on time than to be late.

Photo Book of the Year (popular): Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs. No book was more popular this year with our readers, who ordered more than 200 copies through our links, far more than any other title. Not only is this book surprisingly cheap—we would normally expect to pay twice to four times its price for a book of this quality—but it adds usefully to the Adams canon in that it functions as a virtual catalogue raisonné of his works, from the beginning to the end of his long career. Not the best Adams book, but a good reference work to have whether your collection of other Adams titles is small or large—and a great place to start if your collection was previously nonexistent.

Photo Book of the Year (esoteric): Henry Wessel by Sandra Phillips, Thomas Zander, and Henry Wessel. A long-awaited and well-deserved retrospective exhibition catalog by this significant lesser master. Wessel has been true to his simple methods and his artistic vision over decades of assiduous work, and no book this year gave us greater pleasure than this one. The pictures may not be to everyone's taste, but on the other hand they are mercifully free of the styles 'n' fashions o' the moment in the always-fickle art world.

Photo Book of the Year (Technical/Historical): Nash Editions: Photography and the Art of Digital Printing by Garrett White (actually came out just a few days before 2007 began, but we're not finicky about stuff like that). In our post about it we called it "...a mandatory purchase—for anyone. It's basically the first universally
important book of photography's digital age. Nominally it is a
contemporary account of original history, a documentary of digital
printing's "incunable" period and one of its biggest early influences,
Graham Nash. And it's important enough just for that. But it's also a
wonderful collection of pictures, bringing together a large, beautiful,
and indeed inspiring portfolio from the seminal work of this studio. It
looks modest by its cover, and its title doesn't hint at its true
importance—but don't let that fool you."

Photo Book of the Year (reissue): The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski. MoMA has made it possible for a new generation of photographers to acquaint themselves up close and personal with its former Photography Department Director's didactic little tour of photography's essential mysteries. Not a book to love, possibly, but one to ponder for anyone who has ambitions. The reappearance of this essential little gem was made all the more poignant by Szarkowski's passing, in July of this past year, at the age of 81.

Camera of the Year: Nikon D3. A balls-to-the-wall pro model camera isn't perhaps of the greatest usefulness or relevance to most non-pro shooters, but there's little question that Nikon's new pro flagship takes top honors as the product of products for '07. The D3 outpoints its also-brand-new Canon rival in a number of areas—including high-ISO noise, apparently, long thought to be Canon's strongest suit. The tandem of the D3 and the D300 have been widely considered to be the strongest arguments yet for the resurgence of Nikon as it attempts to establish its historic position, held over several decades, as the #1 cameramaker, a title it ceded to Canon in the 1990s.

Runners-up: Olympus E-3, Sony A700, Nikon D300.

Digicam of the Year: Ricoh GR Digital II. A clear favorite (along with the original GR-D) of our readers, the GRII is a photographer's camera, with a fixed lens (modifiable by converters if you don't like the f-l) and high image quality. It's customizable, though its operational settings are direct and controllable. Although it doesn't beat a DSLR as a low-light camera, it's also a lot more pocketable, and a camera you have with you is a better camera than a camera you left at home. The GRII (available in the USA from Adorama) is the leading indicator that the "street camera" of the future may have a small sensor.

Truth be told, the time for really enthusiastic lens connoisseurship has probably passed; the image remains malleable in important respects after being reported by the lens to the recording medium, on the one hand, and on the other, the standards of design and manufacture have been mastered by the world's lensmakers to a point where most good lenses serve very well for photography without serious limits. We're in an age when some budget lenses (for instance, the Olympus 14–42mm) and lenses with downmarket names can perform at a very high standard. Still, there is something pleasing about a fine lens. Both of these are excellent examples of the art, highly competent and with admirably minimized shortcomings. Either one would do well as an only lens for most photographers on any of the cameras they fit.

Cartoon of the Year: Hey, we still love this! Can you blame us?

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Worst Camera of the Year: Fuji FinePix S8000fd. Want an inferior itty-bitty sensor without the convenience of point-and-shoot pocketability? Want an absurdly long zoom range so you'll be sure to suffer optical inferiority at both extremes, with lots of colorful purple fringing? And, you say, you want all this wrapped in a package with all the industrial stylishness of a videogame controller? Look no further than the Fuji S8000fd, which also recognizes human faces for you, in case you're not sure where in the absurdly tiny EVF viewfinder they might be.

There were, let's face it, a number of products vying for this award this year, and the S8000fd doesn't necessarily deserve to be singled out over all these others. But it's as good an example as any of "the camera as appliance," with too many features but limited controllability, and it's a paragon of several directions in camera design we just don't want to encourage. If you're thinking of this camera or one like it, please just come to your senses and buy a D40, Rebel XTi, or another solid entry-level DSLR instead.

Disappointment of the Year: The continuing emptiness of the "DMD" small street-camera category. The Sigma DP-1 didn't appear, and neither did anything else like it, despite several other important voices on the web (most notably, Thom Hogan's) joining me in calling for it. Let's hope we're not all bemoaning the same thing at the end of 2008.

Discovery of the Year: Photographer Bill Emory, who's been
working for a long time—we just didn't know it. His beautiful, sad,
and touching photo-essay "Sun Dog" was certainly one of the memorable ones of 2007 for us.

Magnanimous Gesture of the Year: The Luminous Landscape Endowment, established by Michael Reichmann with a portion of the profits from his and Jeff Schewe's epic video instruction series From Camera to Print. "The sole purpose of this not-for-profit foundation will be to provide a source of otherwise unavailable financial assistance to creative photographers. This funding may be used by photographers like you to pursue a special project, further formal photographic education, finance project related travel, or to mount an exhibition or show. Almost any worthwhile project associated with fine art photography will be considered." Despite being on the Selection Committee for the Endowment, I haven't heard anything more about it since its inception, and I do question whether such a foundation can really be viable in the long run without the services of a full-time grant writer. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before applications are accepted and funds awarded, and in any event it's a fine, even noble, idea—whatever becomes of it. This is just the sort of thing I talk about a lot, and never do anything about. All props to MR for taking this particular bull by the horns.

_______________________

New Year's Day is a time for taking stock: looking back, looking forward; making plans, clarifying ambitions, and, of course, setting resolutions. It's a time to be both hopeful and grateful. 2007 was a fun year for me, and you and all my readers here on T.O.P. helped make it so; thank you. I have high expectations of the year to come. I hope you do too, and I wish you and your loved ones health, happiness, accomplishment, and many good memories to come. And now, off I go, to continue writing "2007" on my checks until about the end of March.

New Year's Eve, and here in Wisconsin it looks like a winter wonderland, thanks to an eight-inch snowfall two days ago that stuck to everything. I took the snapshot above of my snow-shovelling next-door neighbor and her two little kids while the snow was still falling, and it has looked more or less the same outside ever since. 25° days and postcard snow is why people who like winter like winter.

Hope you have a nice time tonight, if you go out to party. (Don't drink and drive—we want all our readers to make it to 2008 in the finest fettle.)

And please stop by here for a visit tomorrow, if you get a chance—we'll be publishing T.O.P.'s long list of the Best, Biggest, Most and Baddest of 2007.

Bobbi isn't the first waitress to fall for her manager, but she and Dale both got fired from Sonny's.

On the lighter side, check out this hilarious (and, in spots, oddly touching) collection of bad mall-studio pictures on list of the day. Some of the captions are perfect—I especially got a laugh out of "Looks like this was dad's idea."*

_________________________

Mike (Thanks to Graeme Copper)

*What is it with me? After I mentioned this, the picture was taken down. Anyway, the picture showed a whole family dressed as vampires, all of them looking unhappy about it except for the father, who had a delighted, pleased-with-himself grin on his face. Funny....

Friday, 28 December 2007

I think it's been since my visit to the hot rod show that I published very many of my own snaps here, that being not really the point of T.O.P., but maybe now is another good time to make an exception. My friend Tom Haig, in from Oregon, staged a benefit concert last night at the Miramar Theater in Milwaukee, at which he got his freak flag chopped for charity—Locks of Love, I think it was, which uses donated human hair to make wigs for chemotherapy patients. Tom's brother Bagus, after banging on the 'boards for a while and getting the boogie out, was a good sport too, allowing himself to be recruited for a clipping by the chanting crowd.

In between the more serious grownup bands, the brothers allowed various of the braver kids from the tribe to get on stage and strut their musical chops—including Zander, who had his stage debut playing bass. I was a proud papa!

Impressario Tom H. gazes mistily into the future and sees...himself, clipped, cut, and bereft of ponytail and beard!

And the band plays on...last known sighting of long-haired Bagus.

Almost done! Le look nouveau.

Egged on by the chanting crowd, brother Bagus is enticed into the ranks of the non-hirsute.

Emma played a song she wrote herself. Newly-shorn Tom looks on.

It takes guts to fiddle on a real stage. William played an encore, too.

Meg gets ready to sing a Dylan tune, accompanied by dad Mark.

Kelly had her own formerly extravagant tresses clipped a few weeks ago...so maybe she started the trend!

Zander on bass with his lefty friend Matt on guitar.

After the kids had their turns, a real band took over.

By the end of the evening, the Miramar had sold some drinks, a handful of budding musicians had gotten some stage time, and the bucket had been passed several times and a goodly chunk of change raised for charity. And a good time was had by all.

Our old friend, storm chaser Jim Reed (I published a portfolio of Jim's work in Photo Techniques a decade ago, give or take) will be appearing tonight on ABC's "20/20." The network had a crew follow him around while he and Katherine Bay photographed blizzard conditions on December 22nd in south-central Kansas, then brought him back to New York to talk one-on-one with ABC chief meteorologist Sam Champion.

Jim's new book Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey has proven very popular and a heavy seller. Over the Christmas season, many bookstores sold out. The publisher (Abrams) has told Jim that more books are on the way to bookstore shelves. In the meantime, Storm Chaser can be ordered online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and several other e-commerce sites. The book is lovely. And don't forget to check out Jim on "20/20" if you're near the television tonight!

______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Erlik: "And how did it go, for those of us who don't receive ABC?"

Featured Comment by Bob: "The story is available on the 20/20 Website. Text and video."

Mike Replies:That's a decent taste of it, but the video at the website isn't the whole feature. It's an abbreviated version—two minutes, whereas the televised version was, I dunno, maybe six or eight. Still, it gives you an idea of what the feature was like.

I thought the ABC News production was a bit cursory, but still interesting, and great exposure for Jim (although Jim is very good at publicity—he has appeared on "Good Morning America" and other shows, and been featured in many publications). One of the typical problems, as Michael Tapes pointed out to me privately, is that the producers concentrated on video. I suspect that news producers in general are so avid for usable video all of the time that it gets in their bloodstreams and they can't "turn it off" even for a piece about still photography. Other productions lean heavily on the "Ken Burns trick"—they zoom in and out or pan across still images as if they have to add some motion at any cost. It's unnecessary, but perhaps unavoidable.

Interesting, too, that an earlier feature on the same show was concerned with a Paparazzo and his strange "relationship" with she-who-shall-not-be-named, one of his prey.

Wednesday, 26 December 2007

So, did anybody bag any cool photo-related swag for Christmas? Just curious.

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Claire Senft: "Yes, I got two sunny days with nice clouds and moderate temperatures."

Featured Comment by James: "I got a brand new baby daughter! Now I'm gonna need some serious hard drive space to keep up with the photos and video...and time to do stuff that isn't washing and cooking."

Monday, 24 December 2007

Santa getting his hair done. This was as far as I got this morning before the slide show hung. Photo(s) by Chris Ramirez.

Well, we're off now for a couple of days. I wish everyone the best—those for whom these are high holy days as well as those who celebrate various alternate revelries more or less in keeping with the season. We'll return on the 26th with more about this wonderful hobby, shared by so many disparate people who otherwise hold every sort of belief under the sun.

I was going to leave you with a link to Chris Ramirez's magnificent photo essay A Real Santa. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the link to work for the past 24 hours—it keeps hanging up, sometimes on the initial title slide. Chris probably just spread the link too far and wide and it's getting too much traffic (and no wonder). Even the first time I saw it, when it worked, it took quite a while to load (probably not something you should attempt on dialup). If you have to wait until next week to actually see it, my apologies. But if you can get to it, it's a delightful show and very apropos. Good luck!

____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Jan Luursema: "The .mov is 153MB; that might explain why it takes a long time to load. You could just use 'save target as' on this link: http://www.ramirezpix.com/Santa_1/Santa.mov . That shouldn't time out and you can keep track of the progress. I wonder why it's so big (huge) though...a photo essay can't be more than 10 MB in the proper format."

Sunday, 23 December 2007

I'm having my annual "cabinet sale" on eBay, cleaning out some of the treasures from the back of the shelves. This year, some items I've held on to for years are up on the auction block—including a sterling silver Leica! I'm not kidding, although it's probably not what you might expect.

Check out the auctions here, or by searching my eBay handle, txind76121. I'll be adding new items over the next several days, including a number of books, some of them fairly rare or hard to find, so check back again between now and the end of the year.

I'll bet David Goldfarb knows what the above is, although I'm guessing not a lot of other readers do!

___________________

Mike

*No, I am not selling a cabinet!! I'm selling things from the cabinet. I'd call it a closet, but it actually is a cabinet....

"Just thought I had to send this along. I saw J. Buhler's shot, and did a double take. This frame, from a Polaroid Negative (remember those?), was made when I pulled up to my bank one day. I pulled in beside the truck and saw I had a Peanut Gallery watching me. Grabbed the camera and shot this out of my car window before anything changed. Of course, if I had to bet, I'd say no one ever shot a very similar picture to this one, but then I saw the one on your site. Amazing coincidence, I'd say."

Saturday, 22 December 2007

Ever since I was a toddler I've celebrated Xmas. Not being a Christian, I couldn't have cared less about the "Christ" business. But the whole holiday thing? Just my cup of tea! And "X" plays an important part in that.

X is the symbol for the unknown and the mysterious. It's the unpredictable and the novel in our lives. It's what makes the world so much more interesting, that element that transcends the known.

But what makes it especially great is that it's about the answerable. Implicit in X's invocation is that there is an answer that will be revealed.

Xmas morning was all about X. You never knew what was wrapped in those seductive boxes under the tree—but you knew you'd be finding out. Art's like that. You capture that photo in your camera and you can't really know what you've got until you develop the film or pull the image up on the computer. Anticipating and imagining how wonderful it's going to be is a big part of what's so much fun about art—you know you'll get there, but you don't really know where you'll wind up. That's the miraculous power of X.

X makes physics work. It would be just as hard to have modern physics without X as modern math without zero. X is a source of wonderment. So's physics. Take a jaunt with me; this'll be about you...eventually.

We live in a universe governed by gravitational force, the strong force, and the electroweak (EW) force. Forces are the noodges of creation. They make things happen. No forces, and it'd just be an undifferentiated, amorphous sea of indifferent quarks waiting for the end of time. Terrible fodder for photographs. Not to mention no way to make them!

Forces are strange beasts. They're not just noodges, they're particles as well. You can talk about a gravitational field or graviton particles and you're talking about the same thing (here there be devilish details). That'll matter to us, but gravity itself doesn't matter much for photographers, 'cept as it holds our tripods in place.

The EW force is odd even for a force. It has dual identities. One is the weak force, an atomic-scale force that controls the decay of certain subatomic particles. You may think it 's irrelevant to photographers, and you'd be wrong.

The other is the electromagnetic (EM) force. It's lingua franca for the whole universe. Anything that has charge engages the EM force. Y'see, particles with like charges repel each other; unlike charges attract. But what means these words "repel" and "attract"? AHA! Force! The particles push and pull on each other. They can't help it; the EM force obligates them to jostle each other about. And that makes weird, relevant-to-shutterbug things happen. (Finally!)

A charge has an electric field. It's what does the pushing and pulling (that field's "really"—for a loose use of the word "real"—a cloud of charged particles popping in and out of existence in the vacuum). A jiggling charge creates something else, called a magnetic field. A magnetic field, in turn, moves charges and so can change an electric field. It's the yin to electric's yang.

Miraculously, a blessed cycle arises. An oscillating electric field creates an oscillating magnetic field. In turn, an oscillating magnetic field creates an oscillating electric field. Each bootstraps the other, and those interlinked fields go racing off at the speed of light. Photons, my boy, the future's in photons! These are the particles of the EM force.

Photons carry energy. Charged particles that generate them send some of their energy elsewhere. Charged particles that absorb them acquire that energy. Most of the energy that moves through space travels via the EM force, packaged up in handy, bite-sized photons created by jiggling charges. What makes charges jiggle? Mostly, it's heat. And where does most heat come from?

Surprise—it's the weak force, the other facet of EW. The weak force lets neutrons convert into electrons and protons and vice-versa. That's of more than passing interest, because without those conversions, hydrogen fusion doesn't work. And the sun goes out. All the suns go out. There are still photons about, but they're a much scarcer resource.

It'd be really hard to make photographs from the thin EM soup that would be left. Heck, it'd be really hard to make photographers (maybe life, but not as we know it, Jim). We'd not be having this conversation were it not for the electroweak force's dual identity, and the peculiar yin-yang nature of electricity and magnetism.

Our art is predicated on some obscure and unlikely physics. Ain't that a wonder?! There's something to celebrate. So, enjoy your solstice and have a happy holiday for whatever that means for you. And remember—everyone gets to find happiness their own way.

Friday, 21 December 2007

Here's a first: a digital camera that has appreciated in value. That's right: if you had bought a truck full of new Fuji F30/31 cameras and just parked it in a warehouse for a year before selling them, you'd have no problem paying those holiday bills. Contrary to conventional wisdom ("Digital cameras always decrease in value when the successor model is introduced") those two discontinued Fujis have almost doubled in value since they were current.

This happened, of course, because a few months ago Fuji decided to forgo its primary edge over the competition ("Less noise") in favor of being more like the competition ("More megapixels!"). As a result, discontinued-but-new F30s that once could be bought new for $230–260 are now up as high as $400 on eBay, while the discontinued-but-new F31s that once could be bought new for $250–275 are now approaching the $500 mark on the same auction site. Those two cameras each have six megapixels; their shiny new successor (the F50), with twice as many megapixels but also more noise—and, by the way, a shorter-lived battery—currently is selling for $228 new at B&H.

I've been a fan of this line since the F10 started it all almost three years ago; like the Harry Potter books, each successive edition draws the consumer irresistibly into trying the next when it comes along.

Of the four shown here, the F30's high-ISO images look better to me by a very slight edge over the F31's. On the other hand, the F31 has a highly useful "Auto800" maximum ISO setting, while the F30 makes you choose between an automated max of 400 (not fast enough) and 1600 (pretty unuseable). And the F31 introduced Fuji's form of face-detection, which sounds completely gimmicky until you've seen how well it nails focus on a face in the corner of the frame. (Perfect for those artsy off-center portraits: HCB and Arnold Newman could make good use of it even if Martin Schoeller, Yosuf Karsh, and the Department of Motor Vehicles could not.)

In the high-ISO noise department, the F10 and F50 are both better than many brands but perhaps 1 or 1.5 stops noisier than either the F30 or the F31. Images from the F10 ($120 new on eBay, $70-90 used) look a bit more film-like and less smeary than the F50's do to my eye, although the latter is more pocketable and includes both face-detection and image-stabilization. The F50 also takes the ubiquitous SD cards, unlike its annoyingly xD-only predecessors.

With regard to a discontinued digital camera growing in value, there's an economics lesson in there somewhere, but I suspect it's more for corporations than for individual speculators. Not that the F50 won't do very well for Fuji, perhaps better than the F30/31: dpreview says the F50 is still less noisy than many competitors, and a nice plug by the Tech guy in the New York Times the other day won't hurt its Christmas sales figures either.

But maybe (à la Coke) Fuji might consider bringing out an F-"Classic" for those who want the 2006 vintage more than the 2007. There's no reason Fuji couldn't offer both old and new models and give consumers the choice. After all, it seems to be working for Leica....

___________________

Photographer Micah Marty is founder of trustimage.org.

Featured Comment by Studiohatyai: "I've owned 'em all and the more I look back at the files, the more I think that the F10 produces the best looking images of the bunch."

Featured Comment by Bruce McL: "This is very timely and validating article. Just yesterday I gave an early Christmas present to a friend, an ultra-compact Fuji Z5fd with the same 6MP Super CCD sensor found in the F30. [Note: Not quite the same, as several other people have mentioned in the comments. —Ed.] Of course we had to run outside and try the camera right away. It was just after sunset and the sky was darkening quickly. Both of us were amazed at how well the camera did in the low light. Prices are low for the Z5 cameras, low enough to buy one for a beginner or very casual camera user who wants the small size."

Note that if you read this site through a feed, you're not seeing the Featured Comments. Sometimes these can be more extensive than the posts themselves, and sometimes (as in the case of "New Verb: To Goon," below) they illustrate the post. So be sure to check in to the main site every so often if you want the whole experience. It's also a good idea to scroll back over postings you've already read to see if there are additions. Only if you want to, of course.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the two days T.O.P. officially takes off every year, so there won't be anything new posted over those two days. We'll depart on the 23rd with our Holiday wishes to all, as usual.

Finally, please forgive me a mini-rant on the topic of my pet internet peeve, occasional mention of which is one of my compulsions: the opposite of "tight" is "loose," spelled with two "o"s and pronounced with an "ess." The opposite of "find" is "lose," spelled with one "o" and pronounced with a "zee" sound. If something is in the process of becoming lost, you are "losing" it, not "loosing" it. This is a widespread spelling error on the 'net and it drives me 'round the bend, which is not where you want me to be. Now go forth, my minions, my legions, and set right those who transgress. In return, I promise not to mention this again until well into 2008.

Thursday, 20 December 2007

My cousin Liz Mattingly (for you Yankee fans, her husband Dan is the former first baseman's cousin—imagine playing sandlot ball for your whole childhood with a kid who turns out to be Don Mattingly!) sent me a nifty Christmas card with some pictures stuffed inside. One shows the pony, chicken, goat and dog houses lined up behind their farmhouse. Another shows the whole clan arrayed on a couch, minus her daughter's husband.

The card explains: "Right—Brock's leg—Hannah's husband. He gooned so I cut him out."

He gooned. I like it.

Goon, v., to make gratuitous goofy faces or gestures ruining an otherwise perfectly good group photograph.

Anybody got any good examples of "gooning"?

_________________

Mike

P.S. There's a big difference between "gurning" (also spelled "girning") and gooning: gurning is making a funny face to be admired for it and, sometimes, to be photographed; "gooning" is goofing off or making faces to ruin a photograph. I don't think it can be considered the same thing.

By Jarrad Kevin

Seth Glassman: "I was taking pictures of my daughter's jazz-rock band (she's the drummer!!) and this one kid would not keep a straight face. So I put a bug on his nose. The facial expression is purely his own, only the bug is added."

Featured Comment by Suzanne: "As a children's portrait photographer, the goon photos are essential!! I always save a few frames, and tell the kids to have at it. Give me the goofiest and gooniest faces they can muster, and usually, not always, I get more natural expressions once they've got the 'goonies' out."

Wednesday, 19 December 2007

Two years ago gallerygoers had a chance to discover the personal side of Diane Arbus in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the portraits that made her famous—powerfully unsettling photographs of dwarfs, transvestites and everyday people—the Met filled librarylike rooms with her photographic equipment, pages from her diaries, books from her home and studio and family pictures.

Now the photographer’s estate has presented this intimate chronicle of Arbus’s life—her complete archives—to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971....

Featured Comment by John Sarsgard: "Very interesting. Arbus was closely associated with the Museum of Modern Art and John Szarkowski during her lifetime. In that time of fewer photographers and a closer community, she and her contemporaries frequently hung out at Szarkowski's office and mooched his coffee. Until the mammoth show two years ago, her New York exhibition history was all about MOMA and never MMA. I wonder what persuaded Amy and Doon to give it all to MMA? The Museum of Modern Art was really Diane's place."

I'm a little mystified by the decidedly mixed reactions to Geoff's review of Amadou's black-and-white book. Perhaps what explains it is that there's a real hunger out there for advanced information (well, at least in our audience), and the book is too basic for those people.

I got into photography seriously in 1980, and by the time I enrolled in photography school (by accident—now there's a story, but it will have to await another occasion) in 1982, photo instruction books had already reached the point of diminishing returns for me—that is, I already knew most of what the majority of them contained, and each successive title yielded less and less new information. I finally got to the point that the effort just wasn't worth the return, and I stopped reading them. (Actually, I went through a period where I couldn't read them, because my mind would refuse to concentrate. I'd stare at the page like a zombie, thinking furiously about something entirely unrelated.)

I tend to recall most vividly the books that made the biggest impact on me when I was first learning, and then the books that expanded my knowledge usefully after I had mastered all the basics. The former group included David Vestal's The Craft of Photography (long out of print, despite my best efforts over the years to help it get reprinted) and The New Ansel Adams Photography Series vols. 1–3, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print; and the latter included Dr. Richard Henry's Controls in Black-and-White Photography (Second Edition), Image Clarity by John B. Williams, and (although it didn't have much to do with the practice of photography) Norman Goldberg's Camera Technology: The Dark Side of the Lens.

It didn't take me terribly long to completely master traditional black-and-white printing, although perhaps I'm discounting the long hours I spent in the darkroom experimenting—discounting it because I enjoyed it. As my knowledge increased, a number of things happened with regard to my relationship with technical books, aside from what I described above. For one thing, I tended to narrow down into my own major interests, which allowed me to shunt aside those books that fell outside of that interest—so I never really engaged with books about alternative processes, color, or lighting (I learned lighting mainly in the studio). Also, of course, I began discovering sloppiness and outright errors in the books I did read. And I began to be aware of "schools" of thought and theory, many of which were antagonistic to each other. (Richard Henry, a retired chemist, was motivated to carry out many of his experiments by the multitudinous errors—some egregious, some subtle—spread far and wide by Fred Picker of Zone VI Studios, at one time an influential "guru.") This last issue really came to the forefront when I became Editor-in-Chief of Photo Techniques, where I moderated a pseudo-journal that published articles by a number of competing experts, several of whom had a very low opinion of one another! (That's another long and entertaining story, but one that will also have to await another time for the telling.)

That Amadou's book doesn't contain much information on the aesthetics of fine printmaking isn't a surprise, as few books do. I remember being struck by the same absence in Harald Johnson's otherwise fine book Mastering Digital Printing. It's a tough subject to tackle because it's just "soft" enough that it requires a delicate hand, and considerable flexibility, on the part of an author. Ironically, it's just the sort of thing at which I myself excel. That makes me feel low, because it forces me to confront the fact that I just don't have the stamina and energy to write a book on the subject. Not to get all confessional on you, but I suffer from chronic depression and low energy, and there are just some things I can't do (even some of the things I think I can). Writing whole books on speculation (i.e., with no advance from a publisher) is one of them.

At any rate, Amadou's book struck me just about the same way it struck Geoff; I've recommended to many times to many people. However, obviously you should take that with a grain of salt, as it's apparently not making everyone happy. I just assume that most people in need of a technical book are going to be at a certain beginner-to-intermediate level where much of the information Amadou presents is going to be helpful and useful. If that's not the case for some people, it strikes me as not so much an indictment of the book itself as evidence that they've chosen the wrong book; but that's my interpretation, and others have different interpretations.

Here are a couple of comments recommending alternatives, and at the end of this post I'll build a list of Amazon links to all the books mentioned in this posting (please have patience for the fact that several of the books that I've mentioned are not in print). I would promise to dig out Uwe Steinmuller's book and give it a review,
except that I hardly see the point in adding one more unfinished task
to my long list of unfinished tasks or of making a promise that I won't
have the git-up-an'-go to git up and do. And I note that there is a
book by John Beardsworth called Advanced Black & White Digital Photography,
and the same author also has a book called Digital Black & White
Photography, which would seem to imply that the latter is more basic
and the former more, well, advanced—but I don't know either book at
all, so don't take this mention as an endorsement.

Sorry to be so U.S.A.-centric with the links list, too, but it would take me all morning to build all of these links for every country's Amazon. Our links to Amazons in other countries can be found on the lower right-hand side of this page. Thanks again for using our links; it brings a little income our way.

Featured Comment by Yanchik: "Suggestion: John and David Collett, Black and White Landscape Photography. 1) It's only Landscape. 2) Its technical content is pre-digital. 3) It's, um, non-intellectual. That is to say, it would be suitable for a motivated sixteen year old or an internet Everyman. If you can talk about vehicular medium specificity, this is beneath your knowledge...however, it does have five pages on landscape photography as art starting from "What is art ?"; 46 pages on Composition Techniques, and only 22 pages on equipment, darkroom techniques, and the Zone System. So for me it's a handy primer/reminder on the nuts-and-bolts of composition, complementary to the AA trio of books. Can anyone do better? Post away; I for one would be pleased to see other ideas."

The best all-around book on "geting the most" from raw image files is the newest edition of Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3. With all respect to the late pioneer Bruce Fraser, who authored the first edition, Jeff Schewe has taken this book to a whole new level of information richness and usefulness. If you don't already own this book, just buy it now. [And if you're not up for an entire book, note the ad in the upper left-hand corner of this page, for Michael Tapes' excellent "RAW Without FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)" video. Much of the same content, much more painlessly. —Ed.]

Regarding books specifically dealing with B&W conversions there are several (including one by Michael Freeman that shares the same title as this one). There are also a few that deal nicely with the topic within the general "digital photography" realm. It seems like there are a ridiculous number of "digital photography" books on the shelves today, most of which are the same ol' same ol'.

Honestly, though, I don't think that you'll find nirvana in any current or future book. There are no dance-step formulas for achieving "success" with B&W conversions or color corrections Today's tools give you remarkable power and precision for such tasks, making experimentation the best at-hand tutor. Take the time to learn your tools. Take the time to learn through experimentation with your images. Success with digital image processing, whether color or b&w, rests largely on FIRST having a vision of what you want to accomplish. I have long suspected that the vast majority of digital shooters miss this fundamental requirement and spend most of their time stumbling through Photoshop "tricks," arriving at a "finished product" only when they tire of working on the image.

While the skill profile for digital darkroom expertise might seem very different than that of the wet darkroom, in fact they're different only in their tools. (Having precedent knowledge in a wet darkroom only helps you envision the potential.) Both require a measure of talent and large measures of practice and failure. Books may promise to offer mastery in 300 pages but it just ain't so.

Oh, and a P.S. from MJ: "Mastery" does indeed imply someone who is learning; a "masterpiece" was, in the guilds, the final exam of a journeyman who was aspiring to open his own shop. We now widely misuse the term to mean something created by a master, but that wasn't its original meaning. So I think the word "mastering" in a book title does accurately imply the struggle to bring oneself up to a minimum standard of mastery, rather than implying that by the time you're done you'll have all of the knowledge a true master has. Nit-picky, but hey, it's what editors do.

_____________________

Mike (Thanks to Ken and Yanchik)

P.P.S. This post was way too much like work (smile).

Feastured Comment by Antonis: "We should consider ourselves rather lucky that Amadou has put in one place most of the essential information for making digital B&W prints. Not only is B&W printing a niche largely ignored by the big printer manufacturers but the knowledge and technology necessary for top B&W prints is either scattered across the internet or may even be considered 'proprietary' by some of the more advanced printers who make a living with it. Having a serious book on the subject not only jump-starts the process for newcomers, it also signals to manufacturers that there is a community and a market out there they should not ignore.

"Back in July 2001 when we started the yahoo group DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint there was a real need to put our collective heads together to figure out how to best use available resources. Now, six years, 9000 members and some 90,000 messages (!) later, besides sharing up-to-the-minute developments in B&W techniques, this group has become a historical record of the rapid evolution in the field and of how people dealt with it.

"Yet, as everyone who tried it knows, to get complete up-to-date information on printing B&W digitally one has to spend hours and days and weeks sifting through messages and posting questions hoping the more knowledgeable would volunteer to help the newcomers. Such is life on most forums, of course, especially those dealing with technical matters.

"So to get a nice book—or two—gathering a whole lot of esoteric knowledge in one place, should offer a much needed solid ground for a lot of people who may be floating out there trying to make sense of all the jargon in those forum messages. Needless to say, no single volume will fit all tastes and all expectations, neither will it magically update itself by the hour—which is what it would take to keep up with the latest.

"For that we are back to life online as usual. And for those willing to invest the time, there are now far more forums and even more messages to wade through than there were less than a decade ago. The idea then is to learn from the printed page without losing sight of that bigger context which will always be in flux."

Go to any large bookstore these days and you’ll find many books on digital photography; probably four or five shelves of books on Photoshop alone. If you’re looking for something on digital black & white, however, your choices are far more limited. There are perhaps five or six recent “hobbyist” level books on the subject with remarkably similar content. Most contain a review of the basics of digital capture and scanning, file formats and the like. Then there’s a generic discussion of hardware (monitor/computer/printer), paper and ink. Next is a review of image editing technique at a fairly cursory level, and then lots of pages devoted to the digital emulation of toning, hand-coloring and "alternative processes" such as faux-cyanotype or lith printing. There are lots of nice pictures, but you sail through one of these books without ever really coming to grips with the nuts and bolts of producing a really fine digital print. Sort of like cotton candy: appealing at first, but in the long run not very satisfying.

Amadou Diallo’s Mastering Digital Black and White is very different. Deceptively small at about 7.5 x 9", this book appears to cram into its 370 pages almost everything there is to know on the subject.

Its subtle design contributes. The text is eminently readable, with near-optimal line length. Photos and illustrations are just large enough to see what’s going on, without hogging space more profitably devoted to the informative text.

And informative it is. Diallo is a photographer, teacher and master printer who runs his own studio in Brooklyn, NY. His writing is admirably clear and direct without being dull. He doesn’t condescend or over-simplify. This is the only book I have seen that approaches digital black & white photography with the kind of rigor and attention to detail seen in the Ansel Adams trio of books that many of us learned photography from.

The book begins with a sample of Diallo’s eclectic work, though it’s fair to say the small format doesn’t do his images justice. He moves on to a refreshingly specific discussion of what’s required to outfit a digital darkroom capable of producing excellent prints. Books on digital imaging tend to outdate very rapidly, but as of December 2007 his recommendations are entirely current. He frankly addresses the "technology treadmill," dryly noting that while digital has advantages over the traditional darkroom, "sadly, cost is not one of them."

Subsequent chapters delve deeply into the nitty-gritty of digital black & white. "Color Management for the Black and White Photographer" sounds like an oxymoron. Instead it’s a remarkably lucid discussion of the underlying principles and practical application of color management to monochrome work. Ironically, accurate color management is very important to "monochrome" because color casts or crossover problems are easier to see than in a color print. Anyone who has lived through the gross metamerism and color crossover of early digital black & white will appreciate how profiling, soft-proofing, and other tools are finally yielding repeatable, controllable results. "Photoshop in Black and White" includes lots of details about specific settings for optimum control, but it also includes the clearest explanation I have ever read of Photoshop’s blending modes. Diallo gives you a detailed set of tonal control methods to solve most any problem. Yes, many of them are available in those huge Photoshop tomes; but here they’re concisely presented without a lot of filler. "Black and White Inkjet Printing" gets into the specifics of the printing process, with detailed discussion of the options for black & white printing provided by the latest printers from the "big three"—Epson, Canon and HP. This is narrowly focused on pigment ink photographic printers, ignoring the $89 specials at Costco. RIP options are also discussed. Finally, "The Imaging Workflow" uses several interpretive prints to illustrate a repeatable and logical sequence devoted to optimizing quality, from capture to print.

The last two chapters are "The Limited Edition" and "The Portfolio." While a limited edition may exceed the ambitions of digital dilettantes like myself, the concept of a portfolio encompassing a unified and consistent body of work can bring valuable focus and direction to anyone’s work. Diallo spells out what is involved in producing a limited edition, right down to requirements of state law and certificates of authenticity.

As an added bonus, several chapters conclude with the author interviewing well-known figures in digital photography. Included are interviews with such luminaries as Henry Wilhelm (the authority on photographic permanence), Jon Cone (inventor of quad-black printing and the Piezography system), and Roy Harrington (author of QuadToneRIP, the widely used shareware). The print versions are brief, but readers are pointed to a website with free downloadable MP3 versions, some as long as 40 minutes. These are fascinating discussions, often digging deep into the intersection between art and technology. Great stuff.

To sum things up, if your goal is to produce a tolerable 8 x 10” black and white print on your home inkjet, there are a number of books available to help you. If instead you want to consistently produce black and white digital prints of the highest quality, while understanding the controls and tools at your disposal, there’s only one. My copy of Mastering Digital Black and White is getting so dog-eared and battered from constant use, I may have to buy another.

_________________

Geoff

Geoff Wittig is a small town family physician with a passionate
photography obsession. He spends most of his free days hiking and
photographing—mostly rural landscapes—and sells enough prints to pay
for ink and paper.

Featured Comment by wtlloyd: "This is a fantastic book, and not only for black and white printmakers...the early chapters gather together much of what passes as current conventional wisdom regarding digital photography. In this, it is really more of a primer, useful for all. Everyone should have a copy."

The DP3 Project: the Digital Print Preservation Portal consists of two lines of research that will examine the preservation of digital prints. One has been funded by a $606,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will make possible an in-depth investigation of the stability of digitally printed materials when they are exposed to light, airborne pollutants, heat, and humidity. The other, supported by a grant of $314,215 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will be a study of the potentially harmful effects of enclosures and physical handling on digital prints, as well as their vulnerability to damage due to flood.

Sunday, 16 December 2007

I like botanical gardens—they're a great place to photograph plants, as opposed to "landscapes." Kind of like doing environmental portraiture with flora instead of fauna.

One of the nicer ones I've stumbled upon is the Bellevue Botanical Garden, near Seattle. It's public, free, and definitely worth your time to visit, if you're within an hour or two's drive. I give it a serious B+. That's a very high rating. "A" level world-class gardens are few and far between.

From Thanksgiving to the end of December it becomes something else: "The Garden d'Lights." From the description, I thought they merely decorated the garden heavily with lights. That would have been enough to get me there. I'm a sucker for Christmas lights. (And for insight into why they fascinate me, see here.)

But this goes way beyond mere decoration—the volunteers (it's all done by volunteers) create a garden from lights. It's amazing to behold, and well deserving of my hour or so in the car. It's free, tripods are welcome, and it's utterly photographer-friendly. It's the first time I've ever felt that people were being way too polite trying to stay out of my line of sight.

Christmas displays like this are a great place to pull out some of those digital tricks. Displays are often too big (or too detailed) to be well-covered in a single photograph. Even on film, size matters (all the work in my monograph was medium format, 'cause 35mm just didn't cut it). Digital's the same. I often made multiple exposures of pieces of a scene, to be photomerged later in Photoshop, because CS3 makes doing this kind of thing easy (top picture).

It's also the ideal situation to use HDR. Unless you've got a really high-end digital camera, these subjects will sorely tax the exposure range you can capture. Well, nothing's moving and you've got a tripod; bracket like mad and combine the results in the computer to get something more like what you saw (below). I made three, sometimes four exposures of every scene I photographed.

You could go really nuts and do HDR panoramas, but I decided making 12–20 exposures for a single photo was excessive even for me.

Finally, here's a tip for calming the camera shakes. If you've got a semi-stable support for your camera but no cable release you risk of jiggling the camera a bit when you press the shutter release. Using the self-timer works, but there's a faster way. Set your camera for auto focus and don't pre-focus before making your exposure. As soon as you press the shutter button, let it go. Your camera will spend a few tenths of a second hunting for the focus before it makes the exposure, which is plenty of time for the finger-induced jiggles to die out. It's the one time when you should jab at the shutter release.

It's been a while since I've posted one of my little off-topic rants (I tend to gravitate to religion and politics, the two subjects you're not supposed to broach in polite company), but today there's a new one. It's about the audiophile hobby, and it's called "All Sizzle...." As usual, it's completely off-topic for T.O.P.—that's the category—so be aware of that.

Featured Comment by Max: "I can say I have a field of expertise in this post: beef. I lived my childhood in a cattle ranch here in Argentina, and still work in that field, and have eaten more meat, good or bad, than probably most people in the world. What's said is true, beef now is a lot worse, as tomatoes are, and any other product which could be 'optimized' for lower production costs.

"Beef quality and taste, as in most edible animals, is defined by the animal's diet. Originally, with extensive grass feeding, the cattle itself was much healthier, it walked a lot, which reduced fat content, and ate natural pastures that would even give it a distinctive taste according to its geographic origin. These days, because of land prices that has changed completely. Cattle is kept confined and fed grain to fatten it fast and cheap (and also there are a lot of chemical 'aids'). I can tell because this country is one of the last ones to jump on that wagon, but rising soybean prices have made extensive cattle production here an economical no-no.

"Really, you can't buy great beef like there was 20 years ago, and that's just the truth.

"As with everything else, from the Aberdeen Angus (which was all about meat quality, but not really that efficient) to todays genetic mixes, even the cattle breeds have gone for cheaper, easier to fatten, more prolific versions. Sound familiar?"